Historical Sketch.
he visitor to Fredericksburg to-day finds, instead of the easy going town of ante-bellum days, an entirely new place risen from the ruins of war and time, new buildings, up-to-date streets and other improvements making a modern city of the present generation. The object of this little book is to furnish to the traveler, facts in the history of Fredericksburg, its many places of interest as well as an up-to-date guide to the city, and to extend to all a “welcome to Fredericksburg.”
The exact time the site of what is now Fredericksburg was visited by white men is not known, but the general impression is that the first trip was in 1608 (one year after the landing at Jamestown). Capt. John Smith, the true founder and father of Virginia, with a crew of twelve men and an indian of a Potomac tribe for a guide, came to the falls of the Rappahannock just above where Fredericksburg was afterward located, and had a severe fight with the Rappahannocks, whom he described as the most courageous and formidable savages he had yet encountered.
The early history of Fredericksburg is full of events[1] along the general history of the country, it being a centre of trade, the river being wider and deeper than the present day, and that ocean going barges and schooners, laden with cargoes from the West Indies, Liverpool and other ports came to Fredericksburg, and took on for their return voyage consignments of tobacco and wheat to English and Scotch merchants. A fort was maintained near the falls of the Rappahannock, and with 250 men the town was legally founded in 1727 and was named for Frederick, son of George the Second.
Before the introduction of railroads, trade was carried on by what was known as “Road Wagons.” These wagons were of huge dimensions, their curved bodies being, before and behind, at least twelve feet from the ground. They had canvas covers and were drawn by four and often six horses. During the period from 1800 to the civil war, as many as three hundred was often seen on the streets and in the wagon yards of Fredericksburg at one time. The country, to the Blue Ridge mountains, even to counties in the Valley of Virginia, was thus supplied from Fredericksburg.
The part which Fredericksburg played in the civil war is so well known, that we will be content with a brief reference. As soon as the Confederate capitol was removed to Richmond, it became at once, and continued during the entire war, the objective point of the Federal invasion of the South. It was apparent, therefore, from an inspection of the map, that Fredericksburg would necessarily witness a bloody act in that direful drama; for she was situated half-way on the direct route between Washington and Richmond.
If ever anywhere grim-visaged war showed his horrid front, it was at this foredoomed, devoted town. She was the immediate theatre of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, on December 13, 1862. In the cannonade that ushered in that battle, a hundred and eighty guns, some of them seige pieces, carrying seventy pound projectiles, for ten mortal hours poured a pitiless storm of shot and shell upon the helpless town. No such cannonade, save that which preceded Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, was ever heard upon this continent; nay, ever heard upon this earth. Four and a half months after that bloody baptism, the town witnessed the desperate, but unsuccessful, endeavor of Gen Sedgwick to march his corps of thirty thousand men to the relief of Hooker, at Chancellorsville; and she was the hospital for fifteen thousand wounded men from Grant’s army in the Wilderness campaign of May, 1864.
If lines be drawn from Fredericksburg to Chancellorsville; from Chancellorsville to the Wilderness battlefields; from the Wilderness battlefield to the Bloody Angle, near Spotsylvania Court-House; and from there to the starting point at Fredericksburg, these lines will include a space that is smaller in area than the District of Columbia. On this area more blood was shed, and more men killed, than upon any area of equal dimensions, in the world.